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Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychologism: Critical and Historical Readings
on the Psychological Turn in Philosophy edited by Dale Jacquette (Kluwer
Academic) presents a remarkable diversity of contemporary opinions on the
prospects of addressing philosophical topics from a psychological perspective.
It considers the history and philosophical merits of psychologism, and looks
systematically at psychologism in phenomenology, cognitive science,
epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophical semantics, and
artificial intelligence. It juxtaposes many different philosophical standpoints,
each supported by rigorous philosophical argument.
Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychologism is intended for professionals in
the fields indicated, advanced undergraduate and graduate students in related
areas of study, and interested lay readers.

Among the dichotomies that have divided philosophers, the
rift between psychologism and antipsychologism represents some of the most
heated metaphilosophical debate. The problem of whether and in what sense logic,
mathematics, philosophical semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics are
explanatorily related to psychology has been a fundamental watershed in the
contemporary philosophy.

The battlelines between psychologism and antipsychologism
were first drawn in the mid-nineteenth-century. If logic, to take a conspicuous
example, studies patterns of inference from thoughts to thoughts, then it has
appeared to some theorists that logic is a branch of psychology that can best be
understood in terms of the most advanced psychological science. Against this
psychologistic view of logic, antipsychologistic opponents have argued that
logic is not a descriptive theory of how we actually think, but a prescriptive
account of how ideally we ought to think. Logic on this conception is
independent of the empirical facts of psychology. The inherently subjective
nature of thought content appears diametrically opposed to the objectivity of
the eternal truths of logic, and of philosophy of language and mathematics. To
preserve the objectivity required of a rational a priori rather than empirical a
posteriori science, antipsychologists have rejected the idea that philosophy is
grounded in even the most rigorously scientific psychology.

The psychologism-antipsychologism dispute can thus be
interpreted as a deeper controversy about how philosophy can best be made
scientific. There are two conflicting desiderata of science that provide a basis
for the opposition between psychologism and antipsychologism. Science wants both
to be objective and dependent on empirical facts. In physics, chemistry,
biology, astronomy, and the other hard sciences, there is no collision of these
values. It is peculiarly in the case of psychology, where the empirical facts of
psychological experience have at least traditionally been regarded as
essentially subjective, that a division has emerged between two opposed ways of
trying to make logic and other philosophical subdisciplines (broadly, according
to one ideology or another) `scientific'. The comparatively late development of
psychology as a science as well as the subjectivity of psychological phenomena
can be seen in this light as partly responsible for the dialectical
confrontation between psychologism and antipsychologism. The two categories
signify the legitimate but incompatible interests of these fundamentally
irreconcilable requirements for a scientific psychology.

If one could arrive at a satisfactory metaphysics of mind,
then the apparently insurmountable impasse between psychologism and
antipsychologism might simply disappear. Instead, one finds only further
manifestations of these two different ways of thinking about the empirical facts
of subjective psychological occurrences reflected also in the philosophy of
mind. Here they appear in longstanding oppositions between phenomenology and
cognitive science, or between nonreductive intentionalist substance or property
mind-body dualisms and eliminative or reductive behaviorism, materialism,
functionalism, or computationalism in the cognitive psychological sciences.

The disagreement over scientific ideals for psychology
might be expected to fuel an inexhaustible dialectic between psychologism and
antipsychologism. Such an interaction could provide the basis for a healthy and
fruitful exchange in which competition from opposing sides could be harnassed
for the sharpening of distinctions and refinement of arguments. To a limited
extent, the opposition has continued and remains alive and well in the form of
conflicts between realism and intuitionism or conceptualism, and between
proponents and opponents of the program to naturalize or scientifically
psychologize some of the traditionally nonpsychological philosophical
disciplines like epistemology and metaphysics. In most ways, however, the
psychologism-antipsychologism dispute has not exhibited this type of productive
dialectical synergy. The rhetoric surrounding especially antipsychologistic
philosophical discussions is revealing for its extraordinary degree of animus;
it suggests the perception of a very ingrained division in outlook that cannot
be overcome by a consideration of arguments with shared presuppositions, but
that is directed polemically out of desperation at the presuppositions
themselves.

Psychologism has largely withered away under the criticism
of historically influential antipsychologists. The objections have appeared both
from within analytic and in the continental schools of philosophy. Among
analytic philosophers, the most strident assault on psychologism originates
principally with Gottlob Frege and his many followers, including Bertrand
Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and others; while in the
nonanalytic European tradition, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger are perhaps
the most noteworthy ostensible antipsychologists. The friends of psychologism,
whether or not they would be willing to identify themselves as such, have
continued the struggle under a variety of different banners, which is itself an
important feature of the rhetoric of psychologism and antipsychologism.

To consider these problems, Jacquette invited a slate of
distinguished scholars to present their perspectives on the history, philosophy,
and rhetoric of psychologism. The papers with some overlap are presented roughly
in historical sequence, by which the reader can trace certain themes through the
development of the most significant episodes of the
psychologism­antipsychologism debate. The present collection of essays draws on
three distinct sources of recent discussion of the philosophical problems of
psychologism. The papers by Rolf George, Carl Posy, J.N. Mohanty, Joseph
Margolis, and Jacquette’s Introduction were first published in a special issue
of the journal Philosophy & Rhetoric, which Jacquette guest-edited in 1997.
Earlier versions of the essays by Michael Jubien, John H. Dreher, and Jacquette
were presented as feature contributions to an invited symposium on
'Psychologism: The Current State of the Debate at the American Philosophical
Association, Pacific Division, Albuquerque, NM, April 5-8, 2000. Finally, the
essays by Werner Stelzner, Martin Kusch, Vincent Colapietro, Michael Bradie,
Paul A. Roth, and Selmer Bringsjord and Yingrui Yang were specially commissioned
for inclusion in this volume. Altogether, the expositions of critical and
historical dimensions of psychologism offer a detailed picture of recent
thinking about the problems and opportunities for philosophical understanding
posed by various proposals for taking a psychological turn in philosophy.
Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychologism represents vigorous survey of the
best arguments for and against the issues involved in a critical philosophy of
mind.